Stories

FRET

“Kat looks like a normal 16-year-old urban midwestern babe. She’s got the pierced nose, the green hair, a little bit of attitude. And she’s a seriously sick guitar player, leads an awesome girl band. In the middle of her junior year, her parents up and decide to vacate the country, some sabbatical situation. Kat could go along, shack up in a yurt with her stinky brother, and die of cell phone withdrawal. Or she could stay in her own home with Grams, her badass hipster grandma who wears Carhartt overalls and stores a stellar selection of office supplies and kitchen utensils in her cleavage.

Seems like a no-brainer, right? Everything’s tight for like two days until Grams gets all depressed and homesick for small-town Wisconsin. Kat figures WTH, six months in the land of death metal and cow dung won’t kill her. Her parents provide some annoying long-distance buzzkill and Kat’s like FU. Well get this. Turns out Grams…” (cell phone cuts out)

“…doesn’t have enough to deal with, she can’t help falling for Caleb, the dude next door. They have hella freaky toe-curling heart-pounding chemistry. Only he’s got a girlfriend and she’s royally pissed. She goes all postal trying to keep Kat and Caleb apart.

You gettin’ me? Sh-” (moment of silence) “…connection sucks!”

HUMAN ANATOMY

No vampires. No tawdry Tudors. No talking dogs or dystopian landscapes. Just a Jock, a Cheerleader, a Loner, and a Brain, thrown together over a dead body.

Nori Johnston believes in science. She spends most of her time firmly grounded in her left cerebral cortex. So her first class in medical school, an accelerated summer course in human anatomy, should be no big deal. Nori meets her lab partners and plunks them into a convenient conceptual framework: a Jock, a Cheerleader, and Ben.

Nori knows how the world works. Jocks ignore geeks. They date ditzy cheerleaders, girls who color coordinate their fingernails and underwear. Jocks cook burgers and steak, not meth. In Nori’s predictable, ordered world, a smart young woman focuses on her studies. She doesn’t indulge in a schoolgirl crush on her mysterious lab partner, Ben. And if by some wildly irrational chain of events Nori winds up actually kissing him, her dreams should pulse with the languorous, illogical musings of her subconscious mind. They certainly shouldn’t be haunted by disturbing images from Ben’s brain, memories he isn’t ready to reveal.

Nori believes in science. But she forgot about entropy. All systems yearn for chaos. And every body has a secret.